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Thursday, February 03, 2011

Mass Graves and Majdanek

Author: Jonathan Harrison

In their Majdanek screed, Mattogno and Graf acknowledge that bodies were unearthed at Krepiecki, 12km from Majdanek:

the Polish-Soviet Commission, in its search of the camp grounds and Krepiecki Forest, discovered 467 bodies and 266 skulls, which were subjected to forensic analysis. The Commission also discovered 4.5m3 of ashes and bones

Krepiecki is clearly the same site that W.H. Lawrence described visiting here:

I have been to Krempitski, ten miles to the east, where I saw three of ten opened mass graves and looked upon 368 partly decomposed bodies of men, women and children who had been executed individually in a variety of cruel and horrible means. In this forest alone, the authorities estimate, there are more than 300,000 bodies.

Mattogno and Graf can, and will, whine about and lie about numbers, but this cannot alter the fact that Jews were being mass murdered in these areas and that some of the resultant bodies were observed by American journalists as well as by Polish and Soviet investigators. Moreover, note that these numbers were reported with caution by Lawrence:

It is impossible for this correspondent to state with any certainty how many persons the Germans killed here. Many bodies unquestionably were burned and not nearly all the graves in this vicinity had been opened by the time I visited the scene.

But I have been in a wooden warehouse at the camp, approximately 150 feet long, in which I walked across literally tens of thousands of shoes spread across the floor like grain in a half-filled elevator. There I saw shoes of children as young as 1 year old. There were shoes of young and old men or women. Those I saw were all in bad shape -- since the Germans used this camp not only to exterminate their victims, but also as a means of obtaining clothing for the German people -- but some obviously had been quite expensive. At least one pair had come from America, for it bore a stamp, "Goodyear welt."

I have been through a warehouse in downtown Lublin in which I saw hundreds of suitcases and literally tens of thousands of pieces of clothing and personal effects of people who died here and I have had the opportunity of questioning a German officer, Herman Vogel, 42, of Millheim, who admitted that as head of the clothing barracks he had supervised the shipment of eighteen freightcar loads of clothing to Germany during a two month period and that he knew it came from the bodies of persons who had been killed at Maidanek.

4 comments:

Perhaps their intelligence operatives in the USA told them Babi Yar had been a complete fiasco and they needed to do better?In the end everybody dies and leaves a body and during war time more people die than normal.Quote mining and cherry-picking journalists being led around prepared propaganda sites (wanna see some photos of scaffolding at Majdanek) is not going to get you anywere.

Thanks. If it's accurate, it would change the whole perception of Majdanek, because offically they claim only 79,000 deaths on the website and on the US Hol Museum website. It is also interesting that the Commandant disappeared, Arthur Hermann Florstedt. Some claimed he survived the war; Himmler's investigator of the camps, Konrad Morgen claimed he was executed.